I think the fact that internet guides people behavior on a massive scale is a clear indication that machine/human hybrid cognition is not a hype, it's a thing and it's starting just now.
What makes one go to the fridge? A sense of hunger. What makes one go to the Facebook? A different yearning.
Before, people have controlled machines, and they have not induced addiction. Now machines can induce a wide range of emotions.
This is the first step - the channel is open.
On the other hand, when will there be more than random noise and clever hacks at the machine end - I don't know.
Only that we are combined as a species on a cognitive level already by the internet.
One could say that the combination began when writing and money was invented - one coordinating thought, the other labour.
Machines have made this suprapersonal interaction much faster, and much powerfull.
It would be silly to say it's just a fad. It's not a Skynet scenario, it's not the matrix. But - people are affected, and algorithms are getting more clever.
I'm not saying we are going to have an AI overlord. But I am saying the interconnectedness, the algorithms and the addictive quality of interaction is leading us definetly into a new territory.
> Makes you wonder what will happen when instead of the rules of chess, you put in the axioms of logic and natural numbers. And give it 8 months of compute.
The answers are more realistic:
> How do you score this computation? What's your goal? There's no checkmate here. (this was mine)
> If you're talking about formal proofs or maths, I'm not sure how this would apply in general as the branching factor for each 'move' in a proof is efficiently infinite.
Also, there was a talk where a Google engineer admitted that a car you can put your kid into to drive them to school is still more than three decades away. From other sources, this is even more likely because the trolley problem doesn't seem solvable and so we would need to drastically decrease potential interaction between pedestrians and self driving cars which requires building guard rails, reforming transit and so on.
Don't subscribe to the hype.
Not to mention Katherine Bailey's excellent article (well, all of them on medium are on AI and really good reads):
https://medium.com/@katherinebailey/why-machine-learning-is-...
> One thing that both the pessimistic and optimistic takes on the Singularity have in common is a complete lack of rigor in defining what they’re even talking about.